Who Says Kids Aren't Reading?

According to Bloomberg Business Week  "The average person receives 63,000 words of new information every day. That’s about the length of a novel. The cascade comes in the form of e-mails, tweets, Facebook (FB) updates, and a zillion further ways we consume data these days. “If you had this crazy idea and wanted to read everything you got in 2011,” says Robby Walker, who calculated the words-per-day statistic, “it would take you the first three months of 2012.' ” 


So, here I am early in the morning with insomnia, exceeding my 63,000 words.  In the article from whence this quote came, they tout an App to use as a virtual "gauntlet" for  information overload.  I'll have to try the App which seems to be in development, but until then we educators can take heart: This transliterate Generation Me kids who we think aren't reading, might be reading the equivalent of a novel, daily.   The problem is that the novel comes in disconnected sentences, with no literary structure, loosely woven together by self-relevance, and has no beginning or end.  Therefore...the Millennials don't know when to stop.  ' No wonder they are addicted.  They want to see how the story ends, but--it doesn't.   


If this statistic is correct, our students should at least be increasing their vocabulary, if not ability to comprehend meaning.  Am I expecting too much? 

Perhaps that is why the Common Core is asking this generation to "research to build and present knowledge."  If we expect content-creators, we engage them in this act of contribution.  


The direction of the web is definitely moving to a passive recipient of information, and this App is one of many to come.  From the beginning of RSS feeds, we have seen a paradigm shift of the Information Age.  We no longer will have to "find" information....It will find us.  And that, my friend, is why curation is the next big information literacy wave to ride.  

http://edc.education.ed.ac.uk/sindhur/files/2010/09/Different-social-media6.jpg